Broken Symmetries, Random Morphogenesis, and Biometric Distance

This paper discusses the role of symmetry-breaking in biometric recognition. Using publicly available databases, we investigate three kinds of broken symmetries in iris patterns: binocular, monocular, and monozygotic. We report a small but statistically significant difference in similarities between the ipsilateral and the contralateral eyes of twins, and also between genetically identical and nonidentical eyes. Another new finding is a doubling in the variance of Hamming distance scores under a simple monocular mirror transformation, which is consistent with an assessment of entropy

Radial correlations in iris patterns, and mutual information within IrisCodes

Abstract: The discriminating powers of biometric patterns derive from their entropy, just as the hardness of cryptographic keys derive from their entropy. The larger the number of independent bits, or the more independent they are, the less chance of collision. We measured the mutual information entailed by radial correlations within each of 632,500 different iris patterns from persons of 152 nationalities. For each iris, we measured how well the sequence of bits in any ring of the IrisCode predicts the sequence of bits in the other rings. Information density is quite non-uniformly distributed across iris patterns radially. Our measurements of mutual information address how much radial resolution is productive to use when encoding an iris, and we show that a non-uniform allocation of encoding resolution radially leads to significant performance improvements by reducing redundancy.only persona

Ethnicity and Biometric Uniqueness: Iris Pattern Individuality in a West African Database

We conducted more than 1.3 million comparisons of iris patterns encoded from images collected at two Nigerian universities, which constitute the newly available African Human Iris (AFHIRIS) database. The purpose was to discover whether ethnic differences in iris structure and appearance such as the textural feature size, as contrasted with an all-Chinese image database or an American database in which only 1.53% were of African-American heritage, made a material difference for iris discrimination. We measured a reduction in entropy for the AFHIRIS database due to the coarser iris features created by the thick anterior layer of melanocytes, and we found stochastic parameters that accurately model the relevant empirical distributions. Quantile-Quantile analysis revealed that a very small change in operational decision thresholds for the African database would compensate for the reduced entropy and generate the same performance in terms of resistance to False Matches. We conclude that despite demographic difference, individuality can be robustly discerned by comparison of iris patterns in this West African population.Comment: 8 pages, 8 Figure

Privacy-Preserving Eye Videos using Rubber Sheet Model

Video-based eye trackers estimate gaze based on eye images/videos. As security and privacy concerns loom over technological advancements, tackling such challenges is crucial. We present a new approach to handle privacy issues in eye videos by replacing the current identifiable iris texture with a different iris template in the video capture pipeline based on the Rubber Sheet Model. We extend to image blending and median-value representations to demonstrate that videos can be manipulated without significantly degrading segmentation and pupil detection accuracy.Comment: Will be published in ETRA 20 Short Papers, June 2-5, 2020, Stuttgart, Germany Copyright 2020 Association for Computing Machiner

Privacy-preserving biometric-based remote user authentication with leakage resilience

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapor

The United Arab Emirates iris study:

Results from 200 billion iris cross-comparison